4 Ways Connected Intelligence K-12 Helps Maximize the Power of Districts’ Student Information Systems

The student information system (SIS) is an essential software tool for K-12 education. These lifeblood systems help schools and districts streamline administrative tasks, improve communication between school and home, store transactional data such as attendance, and, ultimately, enhance the educational experience for students, parents, teachers, and administrators.

PowerSchool’s unique data as a service (DaaS) platform, Connected Intelligence K-12, is a cloud-based service providing secure, on-demand access to a state or a district’s disparate data sources. It’s the first fully managed DaaS platform for K-12, providing a secure, integrated data ecosystem that’s transforming education through:

• Enhanced data security
• On-demand access to data
• Integration of all PowerSchool and non-PowerSchool data

At PowerSchool, we’ve seen numerous instances where Connected Intelligence K-12 is maximizing the potential of a district’s SIS data. Here are four common use cases:

1. Transfer Historical Data to Ensure State and Federal Compliance

Education agencies are required to maintain all years of historical SIS data for federal, compliance, and legal reasons. Connected Intelligence K-12 allows you to do so along with analyzing live transactional and future data sets in one consolidated data ecosystem.

Start drawing in data from all historical and live data sets, without constraints. This data can be used to identify trends, patterns, and areas of improvement to inform decision-making at the state or district level.

Data governance, privacy, and security are of paramount importance in K-12 education as it protects sensitive and personal information about students, parents, and educators and ensures authorized access. In recent years, the education sector has seen an increase in cyber threats, making data security a crucial component of education systems. Connected Intelligence K-12 can help secure data by providing secure infrastructure, centralized data management, data encryption, access controls, data backups, and regular security updates. These security measures help protect against data breaches, theft, leaks, and other security risks.

2. Consolidate Reporting Across Multiple Student Information Systems

A Colorado charter school system with 30,000 students needed near real-time data access across their five schools. The catch? Each school used its own disparate student information system with separate data storage systems.

They also needed a solution to manage unstructured data, assessment CSVs, and various other files, including W4s and I-9 PDFs, for on-demand downstream integrations with third-party vendors.

The district had data on several internal servers. They needed a modernized solution for connecting storage for their data governance challenges so they could authorize data access with the ability to monitor usage.

Deciding to migrate off their current self-hosted servers would require them to procure new hardware and move to a modernized secure solution for all their district data. Connected Intelligence solved these challenges with data unification, downstream integrations, governance, and secure access.

3. Synchronize Data from PowerSchool Products with Other Systems

Combining PowerSchool SIS AutoComm functionality, which synchronizes the data in PowerSchool with data in another system, through Connected Intelligence facilitates an end-to-end hands-free synchronization of data. With this type of powerful workflow, districts can now move data that originated from another data source into their SIS through Connected Intelligence K-12. As a result, this shows the full benefits of bringing together a variety of unique data sets, such as payments and invoices, attendance, behavior, and transportation data.

Previously, this would have required several point-to-point integrations, making it a house of cards for data management.

4. Moving from On-Premise to Secure Cloud Hosting without Losing Backend Data Access

With Connected Intelligence K-12, when you move from on-premises to cloud hosting you will maintain access to all your backend data, ensuring a smooth and secure migration process. Plus, you won’t impact the performance of the source system.

Connected Intelligence allows for centralized data management, efficient data processing, and the implementation of essential features such as security controls and data integrity checks. It also facilitates integration with other systems and supports analytics and compliance requirements—all while maintaining the high performance of the source system.

Improving the Education Landscape

PowerSchool’s Connected Intelligence K-12 is not just transforming data management—it’s improving the entire education landscape. By enhancing data security, enabling on-demand access, and seamlessly integrating diverse data sources, this platform maximizes your SIS and other edtech softwares and empowers educational institutions to make informed decisions, streamline operations, and ultimately provide an enriched learning experience.